


may your pockets be heavy

by ladyzanra



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fluff, Human Castiel, M/M, Parades, St. Patrick's Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2014-03-18
Packaged: 2018-01-15 19:33:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1316659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyzanra/pseuds/ladyzanra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>and your heart be light</i><br/><i>and may good luck pursue you each morning and night</i><br/> </p><p>Dean hates parades.</p>
            </blockquote>





	may your pockets be heavy

Dean hates parades.   
  
That's not entirely true. Dean doesn't mind the more creative floats or balloons, and he definitely doesn't mind the cheerleaders and dancers. But he hates everything else. The marching bands, the constant noise, the crowds, the standing within inches of about six strangers at any given time. Like, _germs,_  dude, gross. Also, Dean is the sort of person who always likes to have a wall to his back, always likes to keep his eyes on the door. Just in case. Crowds have no walls or doors. They put him on edge, make him nervous without giving him any way to alleviate those nerves.

Except Dean's thought of a way.

He quietly escapes from Sam and Kevin. They're talking about some geeky book thing anyway. Dean considers tapping Cas on the elbow and making a co-conspirator out of him, but Cas is so fucking  _in to_ the parade – Sam actually gave him a camera and the dude's snapping away like the freakin' paparazzi – that Dean decides against it. He lets Cas do his thing and heads to the nearest pub alone.

The nice thing about the holiday being Saint Patrick's Day is that there is alcohol everywhere. You could probably get inebriated just by standing in the right doorway. Dean sits beneath freakishly large shamrock tinsel and makes small talk with the other parade escapists and has one drink, then another. After the third, he's considerably less annoyed to be at a parade. The drinks are festive, not what he usually drinks, although one of them is an Irish whiskey. (Probably.) By the fourth one, he's forgiven Kevin completely for being the one to come up with the whole idea in the first place.

The parade is almost over by the time Dean teeters blinkingly back out. His head is swimming but in a much more pleasant way than usual. Actually, he feels  _awesome_ , which hasn't been the outcome of him plus liquor in a long long long time. He's also eaten about twenty chocolate gold coins, so maybe that has something to do with it.  
  
Large emerald plastic hats and glittering shamrock sunglasses float by him and float right into him and he's just like,  _heya, buddy, howdy_ and _green's a damn nice color isn't it,why don't we make more things in green_  and damn he's kinda sleepy. The parade music is loud and hyper in his ears and yet it sounds padded, too, weirdly. He's at once sensitive and insulated, like he's floating down a very fast bumpy river in a very smooth wooden boat. When he spots Sam and Kevin, he's pretty sure his face does that dementedly cheerful smile thing it never does anymore, because they look downright shocked.

Which is a damn funny way for them to look, when they're both eating little cupcakes that are dyeing their lips green, when Sam's wearing a sparkly hat and Kevin's wearing a... green tutu.

He's wearing a tutu.

“Ah, Hornswoggle and Tinkerbell, there you are.”

“I lost a bet,” says Kevin quickly, with eyes like death.

“He lost a bet,” explains Sam, with considerably more relish.

Relish, Dean thinks. Relish is also green. But not the same liberated, vibrant green that rules the land here. Dean crosses relish-green off of the Greens that are Great list.

He wonders vaguely how long he's been gone, for Sam and Kevin to have become so OOC festive.

“ _Your_ mood's improved,” Sam says, and tries to cock an eyebrow and stitch his forehead at him at the same time. Like he doesn't know whether to be disapproving or grateful and amazed. Dean grins bigger. Then Sam says something about him being an early riser. No. That's not it. 

Whatever. It's not important. 

“Better be careful or you might start a  _trend_ ,” Dean pats Kevin hard on the shoulder. “Prophets of the Boston Ballet. But it's a nice shade of green, I'll give you that.” He smiles again in the face of Kevin's once-I-take-care-of-Sam-you're-next look -- yup, mission accomplished -- and stares around. He takes off in a new direction before realizing he hasn't picked one yet.

There's something that  _is_ important, here. If he could just remember what it is.

Then he finds himself in a small open space within the crowd and his eyes drift to the left and.

Oh. 

Right. Cas.

Cas is standing at the front of the crowd, still taking pictures. He's focused as a statue, arms held out statue-rigid. Dean has to eat his paparazzi comparison. Cas isn't clicking away mindlessly, quantity over quality. He's framing each shot carefully, if quickly. He's a careful, meticulous little thing, always has been; it's just that his efficiency and directness masks that sometimes.

There's a touch of green dye in his dark hair, at his temple, which glitters faintly in the orangey afternoon light falling on him. Dean drifts closer. There's also a little green shamrock painted near the top of Cas's cheek. Dean doesn't wonder how it got there. He's stopped wondering at this point. The shamrock isn't tacky like Sam's hat or ridiculous like Kevin's tutu. It's tidy and delicate. It doesn't look half-bad. Actually, it's kinda cute. Dean grins like the drunken moron he is. He sneaks up behind Cas until he can watch through the view finder over Cas's shoulder.

The parade's last gig is a group of Irish step dancers from a local college. Their skirts are whirling and flapping and their legs are frenziedly stepping along to the music. But their arms are completely still. Like lego stiff. In that moment, with the alcohol bending his perspective, it's the most bizarre and horrifying thing Dean's ever seen. Like the girls are possessed, but only from the waist down. It's nauseating. The ground rolls mildly beneath his feet. The sound of the fiddle becomes intermittently quiet and then roughly loud in his ears. Dean looks away from the dance. 

And stares at the back of Cas's leather jacket.  
  
Cas has had the jacket for a month now and he's been wearing it everywhere. Dean had kinda made a big deal about it not being Cas's style, when Cas had picked it out, but the truth is damn it looks good on him. It's a good snug fit. When Cas has his arms down and in his pockets, the jacket is flat and smooth and perfect along the contour of Cas's back. Which is not something Dean had ever been able to see under the trench coat. Dean sways a little, dizzily. Sleepily.

About twenty seconds pass before he realizes.

He's slid his hands into Cas's pockets.

He's wrapped himself around Cas, forearms pressing gently over Cas's ribs, chin propped on Cas's shoulder.

For a moment it feels weirdly, dreamily okay. For one fuck-it moment Dean just sinks into whatever it is he's doing.

But if Cas's complete, unresponsive stillness isn't the quickest route to sobriety Dean's ever taken.

And then Dean's stuck with his hands in another dude's pockets out in  _public_   with no obvious escape or excuse.  
  
He feels his face flush bright red. Then he thinks good, maybe he just looks spectacularly hammered, and well, isn't that the problem in the first place?

“Hey, uh, Cas.”

“Dean.”

“Is that uh,” Dean says Very Calmly, not lifting his chin, “That's not my camera, is it?” Dean doesn't have a camera. The last one got destroyed by a demon who literally bit into it.

“No.” Cas's voice sounds especially low, this close.

“Ah. Just checking. Not that there would be anything wrong with that if you were, I just. Nice shamrock. Very. Green.”

Cas looks down carefully at Dean's hands in his pockets.

For a stupid moment, Dean wonders what exactly is in them. Like, what else is in them  _besides_  his hands. From the feel of it, possibly everything. Strings and chains and baubles and paper clips and pens and cards and coins. Dean feels like he's stuck his hands into the beginnings of two birds' nests. He wonders if Cas's ultimate plan is to have pockets so well stocked that he won't need to look anywhere else for anything he needs ever again. Dean gets an idea. He digs his hands in deeper. “Well, anyway,” like this is what he'd been planning to do all along, “You don't have any cash on you do you? I wanted to get a uh--” Dean casts around desperately, “a scratch ticket, but I'm all out of dough. So. Whaddyasay?” Smiles nervously. Cas does have money. Dean's fingers find several crumpled bills. Thank the fucking absent Lord.

“Of course,” says Cas.

“You're the best, man.” He doesn't disengage himself right away and then when he does he pats Cas on the shoulder a little too hard. Then he's gone. Gone like the haunted wind. Floating in a completely different way than he'd been before, like he's been cleaved from the real world, like his shoes are several inches too wide. Like maybe this is just one of those forgot-to-wear-pants dreams after all. Off to buy his stupid scratch ticket he has no choice but to buy now, like Cas really believes him, but Dean has to carry through with it anyway. 

Shit. Shitshitshit.  
  
Dean fucking hates parades.

***

Kevin and Cas aren't exactly companionable when they have low blood sugar, so Sam leads the four of them to a tavern down the street for dinner. It's a raucous, rustic, dimly lit place with strings of lights in the wooden rafters overhead and a stage with some folk singer performing at the other end and an aggressively cheerful staff. Occasionally a table will roar with laughter, in a wave of silver pints and glittering bottles and round red faces. Sam is uncomfortable, but he knows he's the odd man out in this group when it comes to taste in food, and anyway he seems to prefer this to listening to Kevin and Cas bicker. (A prophet and a former angel taking shots at each other over things like not refilling the toilet paper and finishing all the milk without telling anyone; definitely falls under the have-to-witness-to-believe category.)

No roars of laughter come from their table. Cas and Kevin are busy devouring the pre-meal bread rolls and Sam is busy keeping a distrustful eye on the “in-house Leprechaun” who keeps weaving in and out of the tables randomly offering people little treats, and Dean's busy staring at his ice water.

“Give it a rest, Sam,” Dean grumbles finally, rolling his eyes. “It's not real. It's just some dude in a suit.”

“You weren't there when I dealt with Mr. Whittaker."

“And did Mr. Whittaker dress like that?” The Leprechaun's wearing a suit that's the deep bright green of spring grass after rain. “C'mon.”

The Leprechaun comes toward their table and Sam's fingers twitch toward the salt shaker. Dean puts his head in his hand because damn, he thought HE was the paranoid one. The Leprechaun hands Kevin a shamrock cookie with pastel green icing. Sam stares at it like it's a bomb. Kevin eats it uneventfully.

If Dean was in a better mood, he might laugh at Sam's expression. “Thought you were soulless when you ran into Lucky, anyway," Dean whispers.  
  
“Dean,” Cas inquires suddenly. "Did you win on your scratch ticket?”

All at once, Kevin and Sam become very quiet. And casual. They give the impression of trying to eavesdrop from a million miles away. Dean's stomach drops, because shit.  
  
They  _know_. They saw.

“Nah,” says Dean, trying not to panic. His vision goes white around the edges. He wills his face to stay a normal color. He can salvage this. Just stick to his guns, play it cool. He'd been drunk off his ass. They all know it. It hadn't meant anything. (It'd been comfortable to lean on Cas like that because he'd been _drunk_.) The dark mood festering in the air around him, making him want to fold into himself and disappear forever -- it's just the low following the high. “It was a dud.” He doesn't actually know if the ticket was a loser or not – he'd scratched it but then he'd just kinda shoved it in his pocket. But he's not gonna tell them that. “Thanks, though. For the cash. That I asked for. You know.”

“You're welcome to try again,” Cas offers.

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Maybe later.” Meaning thanks but no thanks.

Dean's not sure if Cas thinks he's doing Dean a favor by playing along – in which case, what else does Cas think? -- or if Cas actually buys Dean's story after all. Cas is in calm earnest. He's not really acting any differently toward Dean than he normally does. Like nothing really happened. Which it didn't. Except the latter explanation bothers Dean more than the first for some reason.

The food comes. Dean decides his hamburger will make everything better. When it doesn't, he sneaks a look around the table to prove to himself that everyone's moved on already, that he's making way too big a deal out of this. But his eyes just stop on Cas. The green in Cas's hair has taken on a golden tint under the lights, glitters more noticeably than before. It makes Dean irrationally angry. Suddenly, Dean just wants to sit there and sulk. He puts the burger down and initiates phase one: staring moodily at Cas's stupid corn beef and cabbage meal.

Who actually eats that shit, anyway?

As it turns out, _not_ Cas. Cas takes a bite of each, wrinkles his nose and then pushes the plate away in betrayal. He glares at it suspiciously for a while until Sam offers him some of his chicken breast.

No one talks to Dean again. Kevin blows a straw wrapper into Cas's face and giggles kinda maniacally and Cas gives him a seriously dangerous look and Kindergarten Teacher Sam quickly distracts Cas by asking him about the camera. How'd he like it?  How many photos did he take? Does the memory card have any space left? Dean is slightly infuriated by how Cas just proceeds to have a normal, neutral conversation with Sam, like he can just turn off his moods with a switch.  
  
"You took five hundred pictures of the parade?" Kevin says, squeakily. "Dude." Cas shoots him another dark look and then resumes his Data Face.  
  
"Wow, Cas." Sam is working his way through the thumbnails. "These are actually not that bad. For five hundred of them."  
  
Dean deliberately doesn't look over at the camera this time. He whips out his phone and begins to play with it, checks his emails even though the only emails he gets are from other hunters or from subscriptions to things he can't uh, look at here.  
  
"They're good?" Cas asks. "By human standards?"  
  
"Yeah. Definitely. But, if you don't mind me asking, why the interest?"  
  
"I'm not sure," says Cas, probably with a faint squint. "I just know it's... soothing. If I take enough pictures, I won't have to worry about forgetting what I've seen. Humans have frustratingly small minds. They hardly remember anything at all. When I was an angel I had whole eons in my head. I had civilizations and solar systems and the impossible enormity of Heaven and I never lost any of it. This forgetting thing is new. It's. Awful. Even with the camera, I can only see pieces of things. I can only see one angle at a time. Only a few colors. I don't know how any of you can stand it."  
  
"Well, we've never been angels." Sam's good at stock responses.  
  
"And the camera's mind is smaller than I expected as well. I was only able to use it for one parade -- and the parade went by so quickly I could hardly keep up with it. Now I can't use it for anything else. Everything in this world is limited and unraveling. You have to fight just to hold on to a single afternoon's worth of memories."  
  
Dean looks up at Cas the way you look up at the night sky when a full moon slides out from behind a cloud. He's punched in the gut by what Cas just said, by the sudden reminder that Cas will always be partly another species. That Dean didn’t suggestively invade the personal space of just 'another dude'.  
  
He suddenly feels a little bit selfish and childish in the sad glow of Cas's sudden profoundness. Dean forgets, sometimes, forgets  _already_ that Cas is only beginning to adjust. That Cas used to be something Dean couldn't begin to imagine.  
  
But that's just what Cas is talking about. The forgetting. And then Dean just feels bummed, and useless. Burnt out like a few of the lights overhead. Super tired. Embarrassed in a different way. He looks down again.  
  
"You can delete some of the ones you don't want," Sam is suggesting. "That'll free up space to take more pictures."  
  
For a fraction of a second, Dean thinks he feels Cas's eyes on him, but when he looks up, Cas isn't turned in his direction. "Isn’t that just like making the camera forget?”

"You guys," Kevin says, "ever heard of  _video_?"  
  
"Hm," says Cas, so serious and skeptical he doesn't even react to Kevin's provocation this time.  
  
Then Dean thinks: maybe forgetting isn’t a bad thing. Maybe it’s not a bad idea right now. He wants to order another beer, or something stronger, but he doesn't want to bring attention back to his alcohol mishap of earlier. So he says, “Cas, man, ‘one of the keys to happiness is a _bad_ memory’.” For a split second, a window-in-a-passing-train second, it’s the most honest thing Dean has said to Cas all day. But whether Cas sees that is a mystery. “You should enjoy it. Now how about we make like everyone’s favorite Irish man and order some real drinks?”  
  
Sam opens his mouth in a quick, doubtful way but is interrupted.  
  
“Saint Patrick wasn’t Irish,” says Cas. “He was taken and enslaved by the Irish. And he has nothing to do with debauchery.” Then Cas embarks on a twenty-minute lecture about Saint Patrick, and all the things Americans get wrong (including the meal he'd ordered). Dean scans the surrounding tables in mild alarm when Cas tells them that Saint Patrick used to pray to him in particular, how poetic  and passionate the prayers were. Christ, if this is how Cas is when he's a forgetful human, how much longer would this be if he was still an angel?  
  
Then the Leprechaun comes up behind Sam out of nowhere and pulls a piece of chocolate out of Sam’s hair and Sam's head almost hits the rafters. Sam mutters as the Leprechaun walks away and then he finally cracks. _He's_ the one to call the waitress over for more drinks, in the end.  
  
  
***  
  
  
The next morning, the bunker is officially closed for business.  
  
Between Sam and Dean and now Cas, they have a dozen excellent hangover remedies, but there’s no one to make them. For a while they all just stay in their rooms suffering beneath the loud throbbing silence of last night’s bad ideas.  
  
Kevin’s the first one to regain half-normal function. He knocks on Dean’s door and sticks his head through the crack and asks Dean very cheerfully if Dean is hungry.  
  
It is not charitable. It is Kevin being a little shit.  
  
Dean tells him so.  
  
When Dean does finally get up and wander into the kitchen -- not sure if he’s going to eat anything when he gets there or not -- the only person sitting there is Cas.  
  
They’d all slept in the clothes they'd come home in, but Cas had gone that extra mile and apparently collapsed right on top of his face paint. He looks up blearily at Dean and his whole cheek is just one green smudge. Dean remembers very vaguely what Cas had said about three leaf clovers at dinner: that they were supposed to represent the mystery of the Trinity, that good ole’ Paddy had used them in pretty much the most religious and reverent ways possible. But Cas’s shamrock is irredeemably smeared.   
  
“Mornin’,” Dean says in a voice that is barely human, and goes over to the sink and wets a paper towel. “Here,” he hands it to Cas. At first Cas doesn’t react at all. “For your cheek.” Dean motions to the equivalent part of his own cheek.  
  
Cas takes the paper towel and scrubs the paint off slowly.  
  
Dean fills up two glasses of water and sits down opposite Cas. Maybe Dean’s hangover is worse than he thought, but Cas literally looks like a bent-out-of-shape feather. Fluffy and crinkled and vaguely celestial at once. Dean bottoms-up the water.  
  
“I dunno about you,” Dean grumbles, “but I can’t get that freaking _deedle-di-deedle_ music crap out of my head. I’ve been hearing it all fucking morning.”  
  
“Yes,” Cas says, looking harried. “It was tolerable yesterday. But now it’s. Getting on my nerves. This is another irritating thing about being human. You forget what you would like to remember and you remember what you would like to forget.”  
  
“Yep,” Dean says, because that’s about it. “You want me to make you anything?”  
  
Cas looks at him and nods.  
  
Dean cracks a few eggs into a pan and drops some toast into the toaster. The kitchen’s bunker lights are unkindly bright, that white color that makes the edges of things kinda buzz. The shadows he casts are heavy and his fingers are clumsy and shaky. At times he feels Cas’s eyes on his back. It’s exhausting, Dean thinks. He's already exhausted but he's exhausted by Cas, too. Even in _this_ state, Cas has some of that aura of intensity and focus about him. Dean feels weirdly left behind. Inadequate, even though he’s the one making the food. He tries not to get cranky. Most of the time, he actually likes it when Cas amazes him this way.   
  
He brews some coffee while Cas eats.  
  
“You’re not hungry?” Cas asks.  
  
“Nah. Not really.” Dean pours himself a cup. “Coffee?”  
  
“Yes.” After a moment, Cas adds, “Black.”  
  
“Wait. Seriously?” Because Cas has been known to mix two or three different high sugar creamers at the same time before he was satisfied.  
  
“I don’t even want to _think_ about anything sweet."  
  
Deans spends the rest of the day moving gingerly from task to task, not finishing any of them.  Kevin spends the day in his room playing video games but only silence seems to be behind Sam and Cas's doors. The bunker is as quiet as a snow-muffled igloo. And as depressing as one. The silence in the wake of all the noise of yesterday is jarringly and oppressively loud. The stupid goddamn folk music hangs around him like haunting, like the audible version of an afterimage, not there but impossible to get rid of. The fiddles are in his brain.  
  
He’s just so _down_. He doesn't know how to shake it.  
  
After a few hours, his headache is mostly gone. He gets some food into him and then works on some case hunting on his laptop for a while, not that any of them are in any shape to go out today. He considers whether to make dinner for everyone, but the enduring quiet persuades him it’s not really urgent, and they’ve all been eating at different times today anyway. They can fend for themselves for one night. And if anyone gets desperate enough, there’s Cas’s corn beef and cabbage in a box in the fridge. (No one knows how it got there. No one remembers bringing it back.) Dean wanders around his room a few times trying to think of anything useful to do and then thinks s _crew it_ and heads up to the roof.  
  
He’s surprised to find that it’s already dark. The stars are out over his head and the air is cold. He’s kinda grateful for the chilly bite to it after being cooped up in the bunker all day. Also, he’s still in his jacket. He paces around for a while and then stares up at the vastness of the normal, non-supernatural night sky and finds it comforting in a deep, sad way. He stands still.  
  
The stars blink at him brightly from far away, and, he knows, from long ago. They’re an impossible and amazing distance away from him. They’re impossibly large, blazing balls of gas, of fire, but they’re the size of pinpricks, in a calm dark all-enveloping sea. How old are they? Like, millions of years? Or is it billions? Dean doesn’t know if they make him wistful or if they just make him a calm quiet nothing-at-all, a person shaped void that used to have feelings and now doesn’t.  
  
He wonders what eons look like; if they look like stars and planets and systems streaming by impossibly fast, or if they look like all the history slide shows ever made put into hyperdrive, or if they look like something entirely different. And then he thinks it doesn’t matter, he couldn’t ever possibly know. He thinks -- it’s absurd and it’s what five year olds think, he doesn’t know why he’s thinking it -- that he will never be able to touch the stars. Life is weird, that you can stand there looking at something you’re absolutely never gonna be able to do, to have. That you can know that so certainly and yet life’s showing it to you anyway.  
  
“Dean.”  
  
Dean jumps a little at Cas’s voice.  
  
“There you are.”  
  
Dean listens to Cas’s footsteps coming toward him. He swallows and looks over his shoulder. “Hey. What’s up? Need me for something?”  
  
Cas doesn’t answer the question. “What are you doing?”  
  
“Needed some fresh air.” Dean turns back to the sky.  
  
“Is there anything I can get you?”  
  
“Nah.”  
  
Cas is silent for a moment.  
  
 “Are you cold?” he asks.  
  
“No, I’m good.” It’s only half of a lie. Dean’s been up here long enough now to have folded his arms across his chest in an effort to preserve warmth. But there’s no point mentioning it. He’s fared way worse before. He’s not gonna start being a baby now.  
  
Cas sighs.  
  
“Well, _I'm_ cold. And my pockets seem to be full, so I think I need to borrow yours.” Dean registers what Cas is doing without actually registering anything at all. “Do you mind?”  
  
Cas has burrowed his hands deep in Dean’s pockets and nestled his head against Dean’s neck, voice inches from Dean’s ear.  
  
“No,” Dean says, after possibly a year. “I don’t mind.”  
  
Dean wants to say it over and over again.  
  
“Good.” Cas relaxes and leans on Dean more heavily.  
  
The stars continue their eternal winking overhead but Dean doesn’t look at them. He doesn’t really look at anything. Doesn’t think anything. He’s feeling every inch of Cas’s body against his own, Cas’s rib cage expand and contract softly against his back, Cas breathing warm and slow under his ear. Like he’s trying to memorize it.  
  
After a while, Cas pulls the scratch ticket out of Dean’s pocket. He looks at it curiously. He takes Dean’s phone out of Dean’s other pocket and nudges Dean in the hand with it. “Light.” Dean turns on the phone so that the screen glows bright enough to make him squint. He hovers the phone over the scratch ticket.  
  
It’s called _Strike Green_ , which Dean guesses is a play on “strike gold”. The game is a wheel, like in wheel of fortune, except all the wheel-slices are different shades of green. If you have three spaces that are the same shade of green, you win the prize in the box. If one of the spaces has a shamrock, you win twice the amount. None of Dean's spaces have shamrocks, but --  
  
“You did win."  
  
“Did I. How much?”  
  
“Twenty dollars.”  
  
“Huh.” Wouldya look at that.  
  
Cas contemplates the card. Dean continues to hold the phone up for him. “There are many different shades of green,” Cas murmurs.  
  
Dean gives him a side-glance. “You’ve noticed.”  
  
“Yesterday at the parade, I was overwhelmed. As an angel, you see colors all at once, every shade they could be combined into one. All the different greens at the parade made me feel like I had dropped a mirror and it had shattered into a thousand different pieces I had no way of picking up. It was -- I believe the word is 'paralyzing'. At first.”  
  
"Aw, Cas," Dean says with concern. “You should have told us. That sounds awful.”  
  
“I decided I would be able to deal with it if I determined which green was the most green. Which green I preferred most."  
  
“Did you?”  
  
“Yes. But I only realized it when we were all sitting down to dinner.”  
  
Dean thinks of the pastel green frosting on the cookie and the dark green of the Leprechaun’s suit. He thinks of the green paint that is still, even now, in Cas’s hair.  
  
“Your eyes, Dean,” Cas says, looking straight into them. “Your eyes are my favorite shade of green. The amazing thing is that when I’m looking at them, I don’t care about any of the other shades. They’re. Peaceful. More than that. Perfect.”  
  
Uh.  _Christ_ , Cas. You can't just.  
  
Dean thinks he should probably say something witty to play down Cas’s comment, but he can’t think of anything, and then the window’s gone. He just stands there in quiet wonder. But after a while a response does come to him. It might be clever. Maybe.  
  
“Thought you didn’t come down here to perch on my shoulders,” Dean murmurs.  
  
Cas just laughs.  
  
He snuggles his chin closer and sinks his hands even deeper into Dean's pockets. Dean rests his head against Cas's and there's nothing oppressive about this silence at all.


End file.
